Almost a year ago, Anthony Rendon made himself a hate object in enough places for admitting something professional athletes aren't, you know, supposed to admit. Not in public, anyway. He admitted baseball didn't quite rank as high as his family and his spiritual faith among his life's priorities. Oh. The horror.
"It's a lot different now," Rendon told The Athletic's Sam Blum last year. "I'm married. I have four kids. My priorities have changed since I was in my early 20s. So definitely my perspective on baseball has been more skewed . . . This is a job. I do this to make a living. My faith, my family, come first before this job."
He may have even better reason to feel that way now than last year. Rendon has hit the Angels' injured list. Again. He was rehabbing during the offseason from an oblique injury and suffered enough of a setback to require hip surgery and yet another protracted absence. Maybe for the entire 2025 season.
It's been a longer, harder, and more painful way than he or anyone else expected from those heady hours when he was one of the Nationals' men of the hour in 2019. When he was second only to Juan Soto for offensive delivery, including the 1-out solo home run in World Series Game 7 that started the Nats' comeback to win it.
An hour that lasted long enough for Rendon to walk into free agency because the Nationals didn't want to hand both himself and World Series MVP Stephen Strasburg the big paydays they were figured to have. The Nats rolled with Strasburg for seven years and $245 million. One day later, Rendon signed the same deal with the Angels.
The catch, above and beyond the Nats not wanting to pay both: Unlike Strasburg, who agreed to some deferred money over the final three years of the deal, Rendon wanted his money paid in full by the time the deal ended, and the Angels were more than willing.
Then, after playing up to the deal in the pandemic-shortened 2020, Rendon ran into the injury bug that proved a swarm. Once a first-round draft choice out of Rice University, Rendon now found himself turning into one of baseball's orthopedic experiments. Too much as the Yankees had with their ill-fated signing Jacoby Ellsbury, the Angels have had to live with Rendon's near-constant injuries in the line of duty.
Unlike the Yankees, of course, the Angels haven't had as much as a quick fragrance of postseason play, before and since signing Rendon. Throttled by an owner who builds and rebuilds his team as though following marketing strategies before baseball ones, the Angels of the present generations will be known as the team that had the two greatest players of the century and couldn't (wouldn't?) give them the proper support enough to send them to the postseason at all, never mind the mountaintops.
Rendon had the talent to become a secure number two behind that tandem. Even when Arte Moreno allowed Shohei Ohtani to walk into free agency without even thinking about a trade to bring back value around which to continue rebuilding. It was bad enough that the Angels' generational, future Hall of Famer Mike Trout ran into a comparable injury swarm. Did Rendon have to run into one, too, after the Angels handed him a glandular payday?
Fans are already unforgiving with the walking wounded. They still accuse injured players of exaggerating the aches and pains. They still seem to believe that once you step onto the field with six figures or better going into the bank in your name, you're supposed to be invulnerable. I've said it before, I'll day it again: Handing Clark Kent the equivalent of a small tropical island economy won't make him Superman.
(Does this say Angels all over? They signed oft-injured free agent infielder Yoán Moncada to a single-year deal . . . and planned to try him at third base. "No one," Blum writes, "is certain if they're getting the slugger with superstar potential or the player who is oft-injured and was a replacement-level hitter in his last two seasons of elongated baseball." Including on last year's record-setting-loser White Sox.)
Rendon had another issue. Even a year before that improbably Nats triumph, he let it be known unapologetically that he had priorities above and beyond baseball. "I want to be known as the Christian baseball player," the third baseman told the Baptist Press then. "I'm still trying to grow into that. But at the end, I want to be more 'Christian' than 'baseball player'."
Nobody was ready to hang him from the Washington Monument. You can be a cynic and argue that finishing number eleven in the 2018 National League Most Valuable Player voting cushioned him. Or, that leading the league with 42 doubles while posting a .909 OPS and a 137 OPS+ did so. Now, fast forward to last year. When Rendon re-iterated to Blum what he'd first made public and clear six years earlier.
"It's a lot different now," he told Blum then. "I'm married. I have four kids. My priorities have changed since I was in my early 20s. So definitely my perspective on baseball has been more skewed . . . It's never been a top priority for me. This is a job. I do this to make a living. My faith, my family, come first before this job."
The way some reacted you'd have thought Rendon had revealed he was on Vladimir Putin's payroll. When I wrote about it then, I made further note of a Deadspin writer, Julie DiCaro, responding to the hoopla with, essentially, "Where's the crime?"
[A]ny job, no matter how hard you worked for it, how much you wanted it, how much you love it, is still a job. Baseball is no different.
Sure, players get winters off, their offices are pastoral cathedrals, and they get paid millions to play a child's game. But they still have to go (almost) every day from mid-February to September, in nagging injuries and in health, when things are going great and when they aren't. They have bosses, performance expectations, long stretches away from their families, and, especially on days when things go south, a scrum of reporters standing around their lockers, waiting to ask them exactly why things went so poorly.
. . . [W]hy is it that, in almost any other profession, saying one's job is their top priority is thought of as cold, heartless, anti-family, and some kind of Cat's Cradle tragedy, unless the person saying it is a pro-athlete? You're supposed to say your family is a bigger priority than your job, unless your job is to entertain the masses. Then you'd better kick your wife to the curb during childbirth because we need your bat in the five-hole.
. . . The irony that a lot of the online criticism being tossed Rendon's way is coming from the "society's problems stem from too many absent fathers!" crowd is not lost on me. So, here's a dad who says he cares about his family more than baseball. Isn't that what we want fathers to say? Aren't dads supposed to be present and engaged and putting their children first?
In the Roman Catholic Church, St. Anthony is considered the patron saint of the lost — lost people, lost items, lost spiritual goods. Rendon never pretended to be any kind of saint. But unless you lack in heart completely, you wouldn't be out of line suggesting Rendon could use that kind of patronage now.
So he was never really glib with the sporting press? He was never really comfortable in baseball's hottest spotlights no matter how well he did in them? Tell me you'd do better. Tell me you could shoot the you-know-what with the baseball writers and talking heads without sweating. Tell me you could blast World Series home runs at will. Tell me you could dive head first into a river of sewage without wanting to retch if it meant you'd be paid Rendon's money.
Now do it with a shot of sodium pentothal in you.
Thought not.
Meanwhile, at least do us one and all the courtesy of not talking about the Angels "eating" the rest of Rendon's ill-fated contract. News flash: they gorged on that buffet the moment Rendon signed on the proverbial dotted line. And nobody could have predicted Rendon's Angelic life of groin strains, knee contusions, hamstring issues, right hip surgery, right wrist surgery, left leg surgery, and last year's oblique injury the rehabbing of which now sends him to another hip surgery.
Rendon doesn't apologize for proclaiming himself a Christian. But with an injury history such as that, no matter how he's felt about baseball as a priority otherwise, he must have too many hours during which he thinks the devil is playing a few too many tacky practical jokes on him.
Leave a Comment